


At the Hands of Three Husbands

by orphan_account



Series: Forged in Fires [3]
Category: A Song of Ice and Fire & Related Fandoms, Game of Thrones (TV), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Blood, Death, Fire, Gen, Rescue Missions, Targaryens and their brother-sister marriages
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-05-07
Updated: 2020-05-07
Packaged: 2021-03-03 02:33:29
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 3
Words: 6,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24057532
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: She feels the heat behind her back.She feels her companion, feels Tony, pull his arm away as he turns to witness the blaze.*“Your life is no longer in the hands of your captors. I would say you ought to focus on that; we can discuss the cost of your survival when you have had chance and time for recovery and rest.”
Relationships: Peter Parker & The Many-Faced God, Peter Parker & Tony Stark
Series: Forged in Fires [3]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1731361
Kudos: 8





	1. The Faceless Man

There was nothing stopping her, in the end, when she finally left Valyria. She could go and do so many things. Limited by her gender, yes, but with more freedom and it had never tasted so sweet or felt so addictive as it did in the moments her feet hit soil in Braavos.

The Faceless Man had other plans for her. Her freedom was short-lived as he pulled her in his aging grasp upon finding her, pushed her, despite her strength, towards the temple he had funded and erected. He was a strong man, had always been so. It had allowed him to call people to him, to distract them from his faults, and to pull him to the status of second only to the Many-Faced God.

“I’m hardly your only acolyte. Why can’t you leave me be?” She pulled against him, she had people waiting for her. “I want nothing to do with your House.”

“You are not natural, Acolyte. You were one of the first, you do not get to leave.

“If you try, I will kill those you love.”

He had become obsessed with becoming no one. With moving towards a perfect blank slate that could then bear the faces and memories of all those they killed. He would never admit to his followers he had trouble achieving it, but he would admit it to his hostage. He had been careful, she realized in the aftermath. He had waited until she had connections and cares. In Valyria, he was the only option.

In Braavos, he had to make himself the only security. Of course, then, had to wait until she had someone to protect and then he had to make coming with him the only protection they had, knowing she would never willingly do harm to another. In years later, she would wish she had remembered his name instead of feeding his ego in the hopes of escape.

He was charismatic. He was a strong enough personality that within their little group, people did not look twice at his actions. When he forced Petra to be his wife while simultaneously telling everyone that sexual relations were the extent they were allowed to indulge, that they could not marry, they must become no one, none of the Acolytes in the house looked into it further.

The role of the acolyte, he told her, was inspired by her own actions towards the elderly woman. She was the inspiration for the new members being ordered to help administer death and then to help wash and bury the bodies. Death was welcomed here, both violent and calm.

The Faceless Man did not love her, no. He admired her, in some sense, and he was willing to admit that. He found her intriguing, if Petra had to guess, at his core, and that was why he was so quick to find a way to keep her close. She wanted to run away, and she was gone from the few friends she had made in Braavos long enough that she could leave with less of an impact on her conscious than before, but there was still the fact that her stepping out of line put her in danger.

And even if she were willing to take that step and cause that pain, where would she go?

Instead, she snuck away from the House whenever possible. Did whatever good she could, and she paid little heed to the whispers that followed her movements until she heard the winds change. Her first husband, a man wrapped up in death, was a man who also imparted a few of the most valuable lessons to her.

Masks were not always literal, after all.

*

She had left the faces in Braavos, when she left, and she had not wanted to carry them with her. Over the next several centuries, however, she found herself acquiring others.

The first was out of habit, the last out of a sense of duty. Total, there were five of them, and she carried them in her leather bag when she travelled. Since coming back, she had left them in that bag, inside her trunk, under a false bottom a few inches from the bottom of the trunk, hidden under clothes, journals, and a short sword she doubted she would see purpose for but that carried with it sentiment, instead of purpose.. She had no use for the faces, she had thought, and best not to open that line of inquiry with Pepper while she lived under her roof.

Unfortunately, it seemed she would be living in the Compound indefinitely, as Pepper was intent not only on seeing her and Jon pursue and acquire job qualifications, but on digging into what Petra had experienced in order to put her through therapy. She had gone 400 years without therapy; a few more centuries wouldn’t hurt.

Still, taking her bag for a walk, she found a place outside of what she remembered to be the immediate range for visual surveillance. That would have to do; she had several miles of walking to do. She took the potion out of her bag, noting how little was left in her day-book in order to look into making more, and then used her dagger to dig into her finger enough for the requisite blood.

The dagger was old, a gift from her first husband in an effort to appease the fact he had forced her into the marriage – a gift bought and given in a rare moment where he willingly set aside his quest to become no one. Its handle was originally oak, but had been replaced when it wore down after several decades, and now was forged from metal, with a decently textured leather grip and a small guard on it to prevent her hand from slipping. Periodically, she had had to replace the leather grip. Gendry had taken a look at it for her and done some repair on the blade, before retouching the guard with a bit of detailing and putting etching into it.

She had liked Gendry, much how she liked Jon. The world had not been kind to him, no, but he was a kind young man. And while she wished she could take that hurt away from him, she would still always be glad for who he was. He would, with proper training, be a fine Lord of Storms’ End.

The blood on her hand would help her in finishing the application of the face. The spell was old – she had not learned their new magics for taking the faces – and it still required her to nick the skin by her cheekbone in order to start the application, to seed the face, before using the blood on her hand to seal the bond to the skin until she was ready to remove, when the ring of blood would once more become visible and she would have to wash it off.

She had considered asking Arya, had wondered if perhaps it would be wiser to use the newer methods, but had decided to stick to what she knew, what worked alongside the fire flickering throughout her veins. It was hard enough, she remembered, learning to bind the shadow of the dead to something as potent and living as fire in order to mask herself.

Sometimes, change was necessary. Others, it was best to resist.

*

In the end, being trapped in Braavos and under the thumb of the Faceless Man, she had to become no one to survive. She learned to swallow herself and take a place among the ranks. It took her outside of Braavos and away from the Faceless Man. It was not enough, not really, but it became enough because it had to be. She sighed, looking out at the ports of Volantis. She had tracked her mark here, only to find out he had taken the Demon Road the day before towards Bhorash. She would have to secure a horse to catch up, but she had some information from his daughter that he had left on foot. He was to be gone around three months, to account for the time there, time staying for his work, and then coming back, she said.

He was going to be gone longer than three months, and Petra was not the one to have the heart to tell her. Certainly, she had spent several weeks out of Braavos and with the hands of the Faceless Man off of her. Her skin crawled as she thought of it, as she thought of what he had done to her.

She hated him, and she was uncomfortable with that. Breathing deeply, she pushed off from the wall she’d been standing against. The docks would be here on her way back to Braavos. She could look out into the ocean another time. Breathing deeply, she felt herself distance from Petra again. A woman walked down the steps of the city, towards the horse markets.

A woman secured the horse she needed. A woman took to the road with single-minded purpose.

A woman had a job to do.

*

A woman, a woman with the memories of a Red Woman, stepped off towards her goal. For once, it was a move towards someone to preserve a life instead of to take one. Only death could pay for life, and she had few doubts as to what would be required of her to successfully pull the man she sought from captivity. If they held him this long, they would not let go of him so easily.

She breathed in the crisp night air as she walked. It would not be far, no these hunters knew their prey and were arrogant. They kept him close, knowing no one would look close by when there was lands upon lands to search. The cold bit at her skin in a way heat never did. It pricked into her, seeking out the fire and attempting to draw it out of her, to quell it. She swallowed her fire deeper as she moved towards her target location. It was secluded and manmade. An abandoned mine, long since given up to the Earth. Perhaps the people of this world knew at least a little something of penance to the forces around them.

There were two men outside it. They wore thick fabrics, and something of the woman remembered all those years back, that these fabrics, these materials, were meant to stop bullets. A simple knife may not do much in the face of these fabrics. She needed to get inside, she did not need to sound any alarms this early on. A death for a life, and she had to be careful, judicious. He of Many-Faces would seek out balance above all else.

A woman ducked through the underbrush, moving towards an outcropping of rock that overshadowed the entrance to this cave, once a coal mine. Here, she left a leather bag behind. 

*

The Faceless Man died, as all men did, and she felt nothing when they took his body to the pyre. Her eyes settled on his hands, watching as they were burned away with the rest of him. He had never hit her, not in the way a husband hit a wife. His blows were to a slave, a subordinate, someone without power. He sought her out, she knew, because he understood power. The world was built on power, and the power of their god was the only power he could not fully harness. He would never control sickness, nature, or chance.

But through her, he felt he could control fire. She didn’t age, and then she became more of an asset to him. An eternal acolyte, an eternal piece in his game.

She was sick of the games of men.

*

Petra came to herself, through the guise of Melisandre, in an unfortunate moment. She was standing just past the entrance of the mine shaft after having taken the two guards from their posts, however temporarily, with a slip of essence of nightshade.

Becoming no one was difficult, had always been. The time between the last time she had ever needed to be no one, however, the last time she had worn another’s face, and now was long enough for her to forget the challenge and importance of maintaining it. For all she wore many faces, she wore her own carefully crafted faces. It had been a long time since she had worn someone else’s.

She felt hands grab her, shove her further down the mineshaft, just as she slipped back into no one. She only barely managed to hide the blade she brought with her in the bodice-structured armor of her clothing.


	2. Jaehaerys Targaryen, Father of Aegon I Targaryen

Petra met many men. She had lived over a century and had been careful never to let herself fall into despair over the time passing her by.

Of the men she met, Jaehaerys was one of the fiercest. He was a great man, certainly, and very accomplished and driven. But he was also vicious, he took what he wanted, and he was certain of his ability to succeed in what he wanted. She had been by his side for over a year, had borne their first child, Visenya, in that time.

Jaehaerys took her to wife, and then was desperate to get a son on her after Visenya’s birth. He explained he had no sisters, and he wished to resurrect old Targaryen traditions. He had married her when he had no other options; if he had to marry outside the family, he was going to marry someone with power behind them. She had no political power, he spat, certainly not, but she had a more important power, one that could inspire fear in his enemies. She had fought him on it once, had argued it exactly once, before she felt his hand hit her for stepping out of turn. She was his _wife_ , he stormed across their shared room as he chastised her, she was to listen and _obey_.

“I just worry if we force Visenya to wed a younger brother. I worry that she may resent him, may resent us.”

“It does not matter! Visenya will do as she’s told.”

After that, she had to be careful. She whispered tales to Visenya, tales that offered her a way to see other options, that she may feel bound to her father’s wishes but that she could always find another way.

In the end, her husband had his way, had the Targaryen legacy continued alongside the traditions he idolized.

*

She fell back into Petra as she was thrown into the same cell as Tony. The man who had pushed her there had bound her hands in rope, likely thinking her thin stature an indication of her strength and threat. Underestimation was a close and long friend, one of the few that He of Many Faces had never torn from her.

“Who are you?”

Tony looked exhausted. He looked like a man worked and worn down. She could sympathize with that.

She was not going to answer until they were away from here, when they were safe and her name would not call attention to those without her defenses. “I am here for you, Anthony Stark.”

“How do you know my name?”

He was suspicious of her, and rightfully so. She still looked like Melisandre, and she was aware she might be reminding him of other people from his life. She certainly thought Melisandre and Wanda had looked similar when she first met the Red Woman in the course of the wars that tore through Westeros. She had been sure to grab the necklace, to bind the shadow once more as the appearance of a young woman had more sway than that of an elderly woman. She had long since passed over the anger of it, accepting it as a fact to be manipulated and used as necessary.

She listened carefully to the sounds in the hall. She had to plan carefully, had to be exacting in how she got them out. 

“I will not ask you to trust me.” It was odd to hear another voice, to feel different personality impulses from her own, and she remembered then the dangers of going into this without being no one. It would drive someone mad if they were to spend more than a few hours like this. “I will, however, ask you to follow me. When I break these doors, I ask you to follow me out of this cave.”

Tony Stark had nothing to lose, and they both knew it.

*

Jaehaerys never worried about her pleasure. He used her body as he deemed necessary, used it to bring his children forth. She, in turn, tried to use her body to shield them from their father’s anger. Jaehaerys was an explosive man, one for whom fire was truly a personality. It made some sense, then, that he had looked to her to birth his children. Fire in the bloodline in more ways than one.

As he aged, he grew more reserved in his anger. He was not, in many ways, gentle. He never would be, as he never had been. Instead, he resigned himself to thing and accepted the disappointments in favor of the pride-fueling moments that came forward for him. When Aegon proved himself capable in combat, he was proud. When Aegon and Visenya wed, he was proud. He found it in himself to be proud of his children, though rarely of his wife. He did, however, show her affection, on occasion. When their son was still a toddler, a babe at arms as was said in Westeros, he had offered her a Valyrian modification of her name, almost shy. She had known better than to comment on it – Jaehaerys, prideful as he was, would have struck her for it, pulled away from her and any work to make this marriage tolerable would have been lost.

Rhaenys, the youngest of her three children, the last to survive, as her twin sister also died in infancy, was fearful of her father through her entire childhood. With no brother to become her husband at Jaehaerys’ command, her reaching womanhood was the source of anger for Jaehaerys. He had to find a husband for her, he would have to negotiate a husband for her.

“There are countless lords to ask. We could wed her into the Stormlands, make inroads with them.”

“And bind ourselves to their kingdom?” Jaehaerys raged. “I think not.”

Rhaenys was holding to Petrhaella, holding to her dresses and holding back her tears only for the fear that Jaehaerys would storm past his wife to strike his daughter.

As if Petrhaella would let that happen. She would take his wrath so long as she breathed if it meant protecting her children from it.

“Jaehaerys, my lord husband, we can find her a suitable match.”

Jaehaerys fumed, pushing the papers and quills from the desk of his solar as he raged at his situation. The groan from his throat was almost a growl, and he paced across the room with heavy slapping of leather boots as he considered who he could marry his youngest daughter to.

Aegon had slipped into the room. Aegon, who was secure in his mother’s love and strived always for his father’s pride, had watched the exchanges. “I could marry her.”

“You’re already married to Visenya,” Petrhaella looked to Aegon, the ambitious boy he was she never knew what his mind was planning next. That an idea like this had come from him with so little warning felt only part of his character.

Jaehaerys considered his only son.

*

Pepper did not know what to do. Petra had disappeared, and there were delicately penned notes and a search history to point to her having conducted her own investigation. Petra had mentioned wanting to help, but Pepper had heard a misplaced sense of obligation in her, a motivation borne out of that need to prove herself that got her lost in the first place.

Jon was careful not to give her away. Instead, he kept Pepper from noticing right away by preparing Morgan, an early riser much like Petra and Jon, a basic breakfast of fruit, bread, and butter. He was not, according to FRIDAY, comfortable with appliances, was hesitant to use them for fear of doing damage. He kept her busy by telling her stories, FRIDAY told her later, and by finding long sticks and teaching her some simplified sword forms.

He had taken to training those enhanced that they were protecting very quickly, and Pepper had set up an account and payroll for him for the work he did each day. He took to leadership well, and she could see the same in Petra she would admit. She could see that same natural carriage of someone who encouraged others to hand her power.

She sat across from Jon, next to Morgan. He was telling her a story of some battle, toned down, and using some of her small animal toys to explain it.

“Robb pushed the Lannister armies back, and managed to do the one thing that would anger Lord Tywin most – he took his son captive. The Golden Lion, Jaime Lannister of the Kingsguard.”

Pepper was at least willing to hear through this point. “I was wondering how long you thought you would cover for Petra.”

Jon met her eyes. “She said she would be a few days. She’s a capable fighter; I promise you, she will do what is in her power for your husband.”

“She could have spoken to me.”

Jon’s head tilted to the side, not a concession but something close. “She has fought alone before. Many people have. I can’t really tell you what made her do it, because even if she trusts me she plays things close to her breast. She does not share her plans, not when it has nothing to do with you.

“She’s looking for your husband, Lady Stark.”

“Miss Stark.”

“What?”

Pepper could feel the tension in her shoulders as she thought about Petra putting herself in danger for Tony. Could feel some sense of guilt pulling at her. “We don’t have lords and ladies here. It’s Miss.”

She would get to the ‘Stark’ part later.

*

She could not risk fires in halls so tight, much less in a mineshaft. She was careful, instead, to find a way to jam the lock so that she would be able to open their little cell on her own later. She waited several shifts of guards to move so she could determine their habits. She asked questions of Tony, the only time she actively broke the silence knowing she was bearing the face of another. It would not do to give herself away too early, to put him on edge more than he already was, so she takes the information and then sits in the silences.

One meal a day, he thought it was around noon but was not sure. She feels the weight of her dagger in her bodice and

Three shifts, one meal, and a jammed lock. She waited for the brief seconds during which the current guard would be walking away but the other would be moving into his position. She slammed the door into the new guard with the intent to disorient before putting her knife into the throat of the other one, no time to make it look like an accident. This was not a contract for the Faceless Men, not a prettily and artfully given offering to the Many-Faced God. No, this is running as much from her own God as her God runs from her, and she is well aware that to turn his back on her once more, to spare her life and Tony’s, it will require, at minimum, two deaths. The blade is pulled from his throat and in the spray of blood she whips around to plant it into the other guard, leaving him to bleed out into the stone and the dirt.

These two guards are the offerings she can make in that moment, the hastily given blood she can spill over the eyes of her God so that he does not look at her while she runs, pulling Tony through the corridors she has memorized. She paused their run at moments, ducking into shadows as she once had in Dragonstone, but instead of hiding herself or her children from her raging husband she is only taking them from the eyes of Death once more.

*

Jaehaerys agreed to Aegon’s plan, but only just. He signs his only other child into the arms of her brother, and it puts a thorn in his marriage. Petrhaella cannot see past that he has now wed both daughters to their brother. She never understood the Targaryen traditions, nor did she understand the need to preserve them past Valyria.

Petrhaella, for her part, does what she can. She understands her role in this cycle, and knows that she is bound to her husband until his death. When he dies, she is grieved. Not for lost love, but for the man who fathered her children, whom she holds so dear. She visits his body in the Sept, watches the ceremonies for him, and honors him in her own religion. The Seven have taken him, and the Stranger is his guide, now, much how he, an aspect of He of Many Faces, had been her guide throughout her long years.

Jaehaerys dies, and while she does not mourn the length her children do, her children honor her in the aftermath. She sees them through their grief, and it is Aegon who moves towards his next ambition, always cunning and craving constant movement.

*

She feels the adrenaline, recognizes it for what it is, and pushes the chill down. She can know the mechanics of fear but it does not change the fact she can feel her God’s eyes on her once more, this time not asking equanimity, payment, but giving warning. She has to be quick, she has to get the captive out of the cave and they have to run as fast as they can. She considers the fire inside her – she has barely enough, but she could do it. She could create a distraction for her God and for the captors. Whatever evidence of the captor there may have been would be lost, but…

But she knows that she has a goal, a purpose, and she cannot fail in this. Not now. She must take the opportunities presented to her.

They reach the opening of the cave, the entrance to the mine shaft. She allows part of herself to release as they have exited, as soon as they are far enough away. She feels the heat behind her back.

She feels her companion, feels Tony, pull his arm away as he turns to witness the blaze. 


	3. Doran Martell

“We don’t have time for this, come along!” She grabs his arm and forces him to follow, utilizing that enhanced strength as she so rarely does. She refuses to let her God take him when she has brought him this far.

*

Doran was not, contrary to rumor, her husband. Following his wife’s death, he never remarried. Instead, with his approval, Petra acted as a buffer between him and those who might have sought marrying into the Dornish royal family. They acted instead as equals, with her offering counsel as requested and offering assistance in ruling where Doran could not act. Parlaying with the smallfolk, working towards their benefit, and concealing his condition were all roles she took on without the ask but with all the grace of her position.

Doran treated her as his equal, and in many ways she was a secondary ruler in Dorne in a very informal sense. She is a woman with power, and it is reminiscent enough of times she ruled in the stead of grandchildren, and of times she ruled over the keep of Dragonstone as its Lady, the wife of Jaehaerys Targaryen. The warmth of Dorne feels a hearkening to the heat of Valyria, and the cold winter she meets after Robert’s Rebellion chills her bones and weakens her, no matter how closely she clings to the fires. It is in these moments she feels anything close to her age, these moments where she and Doran come together in their pains.

The Water Gardens, when they move there, offer something reminiscent of the alleyways and waterways of Braavos, call her back to the days where river winds in the summer kissed her cheeks as softly as these winds, and where the winters chill was just as abrasive as the ones in Westeros.

She supposed, when she considered the rumors, that they had loved each other in their own way. Doran was famous for his love match – not a common path to take in marriage. She could understand the people around him looking toward their partnership as a repetition of that. Their love was not courtly, not romantic. No, their love was rather one of appreciation. Doran gave her space to expand her horizons, and she challenged him without challenging his authority.

They were very similar, in some regards, and terribly different in others, and it made for interesting conversation and predominately pleasant company.

*

Tony followed the red woman across the hill, feeling the strong pull on his arm and giving in to prevent injury. She pulled him to an outcropping, grabbed a bag and threw it over her shoulder and took a moment to look out to the mineshaft. When she sighed, relief pulling her shoulders out and down, letting her take the moment of relief to shift gears.

“Didn’t you say we had no time?”

“Yes,” she removed her necklace and reached toward her chin. Probably wasting that oh so precious time for an itch, Tony thought, until she pulled at the skin and he watched in enthralled disgust as the skin separated and one face was replaced with another. The necklace and face were stashed into her bag. There was a ring of blood around her face, in the edges of her hairline. “But they will look for a red woman who stands out, not for a plain one against the surrounding of a dark forest.”

*

The Stag King was a subject between them. Between Doran and Oberyn, between Doran and Petra, who insisted on her original name to put political distance between herself and her childrens’ dynasty, and between Oberyn and Petra. But where Doran did not speak of it, kept his plans to himself and attempted to quell Oberyn’s more forceful aspirations for vengeance, Petra attended them.

He looked at the steel blade in his hand. Never let it be said he was more flash than substance – yes, this blade carried the same type of distracting beauty that would demand underestimation, but in a woman’s hand that power would be dangerous. In this woman’s hand, that power would be lethal.

Doran looked over Oberyn’s shoulder, looking to the etchings on it. “You certainly are giving her a rather extravagant gift. Ellaria will not pleased that you shower so much attention on another woman.”

“It was Ellaria’s idea. She designed the etchings as well,” Oberyn slipped the blade back into its accompanying scabbard. It wasn’t Valyrian steel, but it was a lovely blade made by a Dornish master smith. “She and the Queen Mother have gotten rather close in the last several years.”

*

He could ignore the blood on her face, think it was mud, until they got back to the Compound. He had limited people skills, and it amounted mostly to pestering her with questions that put stern lines in her jaw reminiscent of his mother and a terse movement to her that reminded him of his father. She didn’t answer him.

After the first hour, he finally asked a different question. “Did it bother you?”

“Did what bother me?”

“Pushing a knife into a man’s throat, what the hell do you think I mean?”

“Only death can pay for life.” Petra looked back at him. “As you likely know, even if you do not admit it. How I feel about it matters not.”

*

The blade was given to her by Doran, for all that Oberyn designed and commissioned it. The cover was implicitly agreed upon as the rumors followed them around Sunspear. It was a short, thin sword, but the etching on it were what captured her attentions. They looked ornamental, upon the first glance, but they were deeper than ornamental etchings.

No, these were meant to carry poisons. And that was what gave her the first indication it was Oberyn, who subscribed to her same principle of utilizing what weapons were available to win the fight in front of them.

The world would not spare them for the sake of their honor, and the two of them knew that only too well. Power was power, life was life. The cost of survival was often high.

“It’s a beautiful blade.”

“You’re a beautiful woman, one with many talents.”

“I appreciate your kindness, Prince Doran.” She looked to him, trying to discern the motive behind this. It made no sense.

“You will be an excellent tutor for my brother’s Sand Snakes. As they’re growing, they need not only combat tutors, but women who can teach them to fight. Ellaria will undoubtedly assist, but she is not disposed towards combat.”

A service for a blade. That was a lower cost than she expected. Likely it would not be the only one.

*

“That sounds almost religious, kid.”

The look that flickered over her face, a raise to the brow and a quirk of the corner of her lips, told Tony he might be onto something.

“Your life is no longer in the hands of your captors. I would say you ought to focus on that; we can discuss the cost of your survival when you have had chance and time for recovery and rest.”

Tony did not know the time. Could not have guessed. The moon was long since set, and there was a burnishing on the eastern horizon, but it was nowhere near the sunrise. “How are you still going? It’s late.”

She was back to ignoring his questions, it would seem. Or, she was ignoring certain topics, but wouldn’t just say it. No, she was willing to answer to questions of mechanics. He was a mechanic, he supposed, he could handle the discussion of the mechanics of the world, of paying for life with death even if that transactional of a lens bothered him.

A few moments later, she stopped. Her hand pushed him back, and he forgot how strong she was with the enhancements that had given her those powers of hers.

“We are almost to the limits of your Compound’s surveillance.” She looked back.

“And?” He didn’t like this pause. Her eyes on him were calculating, and he never liked that look in anyone. It always led to disappointment.

“Anthony Stark, your wife has been looking for you for several months. FRIDAY will undoubtedly notify her the second you cross into sights.

“You will not breathe a word of what you saw this night.” She held his attention, commanded it even, and for all that he could demand it of a room and pull it towards him it had never been with the intensity, with a magnetism quite like that. “We will, in due time, discuss it, but until then it stays between us, as two witnesses.”

It was a command as much as her posture and timbre of her voice were laced with commands, and he bristled underneath them. He hated that he was already chafing under the authority in her voice and posture. Someone had trained this into her, and had trained her well to wear the trappings of power with aplomb and a veneer of experience.

But she did not control him, and her power was imagined, at best.

He tried not to think about the fire they had left behind, or the spray of blood that had left its mark upon her clothing.

*

Doran and she found their greatest pleasure in their greatest disagreement. A follower of the Seven, though in many ways far less devout than even the average passing member of his family, he clashed with her ‘death cult’s perversion’, as he named her god, and the two found an impasse they continued to negotiate. The Late Walder Frey could not have navigated this impasse, not for any benefit at the least.

“You of all people should be against the entirety of divinity being invested into a death god!”

“Your entire religion is the idea that they are all aspects of one, and yet the one you refuse is the Stranger; what does that say of your gods, that you all fear your death god?”

“Our death god is not mentioned because one does not welcome death!”

“Death will make himself welcome whenever he sees fit.”

“And yet you dance around your god, evading death even in combat whenever possible.” Doran gestured to her. “What does that say of you, that you pay for your life in the deaths of others?”

She paused. “And whose death bought my survival in the Rebellions? Whose life bought my survival in my travels, travels across this world?”

“Your life was bought by the life of your grandsons, Aerys and Rhaegar. And Aegon. Rhaenys bought your life, her blood on the grounds of the Red Keep.”

“And yet you do not ask for my blood in return.”

“You did not sell their lives. You did not sell Elia, no you wanted to do her right for what your grandson did.

“Your grandchildren, your adult grandchildren at any rate, sold their own lives for yours.” Doran was not looking at her, he was looking out over the Water Gardens from his wheelchair, a degree of awe at the beauty and contempt at his limitations in his face. “Your family has always sold their lives away for their ambition. And you, with no ambition, are the one to come out alive every time. You are a threat to every King, no matter the dynasty, because the smallfolk fear _and_ love you. You are older and wiser than anyone they’ll meet, you’re a relic and a piece of current, living history. You are kind to them, but you have stories behind you, Petrhaella Targaryen, and your history is not so clean, not so pristine. How can it be in that family?

“Fire and blood are more than Targaryen words, Queen Mother.” Doran regarded her. “They are your words, too. They are the currency with which you and your god barter, and they are the currency your family never bothered learning to use. Very few men learn to use them, not effectively. You are a very rare case, Petrhaella. Very rare indeed.”

*

They walked into the Compound, and Pepper was awaiting them. Petra slipped into the shadows, disappearing from them. Pepper held him close, put her hands to his face and looked at him as though she didn’t believe that he was there. She sat him down, asked FRIDAY to scan him, fretted over him.

The blood-covered woman he walked in with was replaced, in the next half hour, with a clean woman in a regal gown. In the stead of a woman with her hand on the knife, there was a woman with her head held high, her hands ready to direct people as delicately and quickly as her words. Pepper gave her a look, a look that was equal parts exasperated and pleased. She muttered a fast and precious _Thank you_ to Petra. Tony realized she was right. As much as he hated being ordered, commanded, he would not take his return from Pepper with the blood of men who had beat him. He would not breathe of what she had done, would not breathe of the face she had worn as a mask, as a cover.

She had walked more comfortably on that line of life and death more easily than many of the others he had worked with, had negotiated her potential demise without a hesitation. He had negotiated his morals for less, and would negotiate them here and now for the sake of finding and protecting his people in the interest of protecting those that could not protect themselves.

He focused his attentions back on Pepper as she had him taken to medical, then ushered him to their bed for sleep. He would deal with the complicated emotions he was feeling another time. He could deal with them later, when he had a chance to discuss things with Petra.


End file.
